Parkerson drove through the night on Interstate 95, through South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, the traffic thinning out around him as darkness settled in. He played Bach at low volume on the CD player and kept the Cadillac humming at a steady southbound clip.
It was just after two in the morning by the time he reached Jacksonville, and he stopped for a cup of coffee and a bad hamburger at an all-night diner off the highway. The waitress was middle-aged. Rings under her eyes. The diner was mostly empty; a couple truck drivers played poker by the door.
Parkerson sipped his coffee and studied his reflection in the window. He looked as tired as the waitress and twice as unkempt. His suit was wrinkled. There was grease on his shirt. His hair was mussed, and his eyes were bloodshot. He was sick of driving. Sick of being awake. He wanted to crawl into a warm bed somewhere and sleep it off.
He thought about his own bed, his home, and wondered what his wife was thinking. If she’d bought his hurried excuse. Rachel didn’t ask many questions about his job, and he didn’t tell her much. He surely didn’t tell her about Killswitch.
Not that she had any right to be upset with him. He was simply a service provider, filling a vacuum in the market. Morality was an imperfection, a crutch for the weak. Money was the only absolute.
Parkerson looked out at the highway, a few cars speeding southbound, and he felt a little shiver run through him as he wondered what waited at the end of the road. He was nervous, he realized. It went with the territory.
There had been other close calls, with other assets. Murder was a natural attention-getter. Sometimes there were witnesses. It wasn’t normally a big deal. The alibis were sound. The escape routes were well planned. So far, nobody had managed to trace the assets.
Not yet, anyway.
Parkerson pushed back from the table. Downed the rest of his coffee and splashed cold water on his face in the bathroom. Dried up with a piece of rough paper towel and bought a Red Bull from the tired waitress as he settled his tab. Then he walked back to his car and idled out to the highway again. Miami lay waiting, 350 miles distant.